The Americans: "Safe House" review UPDATED!

Phil the Sick Day parent, John Denver, and the Potato that saved the Western Hemisphere. It’s time for my review of this week’s episode of The Americans, “Safe House.” But, first, I need to return some salacious answering machine messages…

After an odd week off in the midst of a non-stop season, The Americans has returned with an episode dripping with seething rage borne of separations. After Phil and Liz make their “pause button” official to their children, Paige goes off on Elizabeth, blaming her with nary a fact to prove that it was her fault.  This is similar to Agent Gad and Stan Beeman assuming Chris Amador was taken by the KGB, when it actually turns out he was the victim of his own admitted weakness: the female sexual organ¹. I had pondered whether or not Amador was following up on Phillip because he was jealous or because he was suspicious.  Turns out it was the jealousy.

When Phil and Liz spend their day and a half apart, they spend far more time together than I think they had planned.  I’d worry about their travel agency customer service levels, but I suppose it’s not their main source of income.  I let my mind wander a bit, thinking about how it seems like it is always the man who takes some time at a fleabag motel while the mother stays in the house, and, when I was younger, I had thought, “wow, that is completely unfair – the guy has to go sleep in a strange bed and be away from where he is comfortable, while the woman gets the entire bed to herself?  That’s crap!”  Instead, I realize now, the woman has to stay and pretend everything is the same for her children, while the guy gets to go watch SportsCenter and play Angry Birds on his iPad in a Holiday Inn Express somewhere.

The Jennings family hits all the “parental separation” tropes – Paige blames her mother unfairly², Henry withdraws at school, and nothing Liz tries to do seems to work.  At this point, the Jennings Family has become a weird simulacrum of the 80s idyllic TV family – 2.3 kids, some marital strife, a boy and a girl, and neighbors across the way.  It all seems too perfect, except for the fact that it is supposed to seem that way to allay suspicion.  In fact, drawing suspicion from Sandra Beeman makes the Jennings’ marriage seem a bit more realistic to outsiders.  This all makes me think about how the marriage has to seem too perfect in order to play the role of being a façade.

While Liz is stuck with her daughter who has blamed her for everything under the sun, Stan goes and plows his way through Martha, gets into a crazed West Side Story knife fight with Amador that goes awry³, and then nurses him like he is a sick child home from school with a stomachache⁴.  See what I mean about him getting to do all the fun stuff?! Liz bought a wok that Paige doesn’t want her to use.  Phil treats Amador with care, patches his wound, gives him morphine, and fails to interrogate him until Liz arrives, looking like a dead ringer for a late 1970s John Denver.  Interrogating captured and dying FBI agents ain’t nothin’ but a funny, funny riddle.

As soon as Liz arrives, the tenor of the meeting changes, and she instantly wants to begin the process of interrogating him.  Phil’s demeanor changes, and we revert to the parental roles for each of them – Phil the caretaker, Liz the disciplinarian.  All the while this feeble interrogation is taking place, the FBI is scrambling to respond.  There had already been a plan in place to kill Arkady, which Agent Gad discussed quite cavalierly at Stan’s ugly sweater party party where everyone showed up wearing ugly sweaters un-ironically.  As Martha tells us, the Reagan Administration is ramping up the rhetoric and the actions against the KGB, in what Granny refers to as “the secret war.”  Unfortunately for the FBI/CIA, Arkady saved his own hide by burning his hand on a baked potato in the microwave. The potato is like Homer’s inanimate carbon rod – it is the unsung hero of the episode, saving Arkady from kidnapping or death. With Amador dead, and a useless Rezidentura staffer in custody, the FBI/The Americans came out on the losing end this time around.

Agent Gad made a few mentions of Nina to Stan, and wanting to protect her from a Rezidentura mole hunt.  What’s funny is, from what I can remember, once Visily went down, wasn’t the mole hunt over?  I assumed the KGB was under the impression that they got their man.  Perhaps this is Agent Gad and Stan being paranoid, or perhaps they were just worried that Amador would spill that there was a mole, and that it was Nina.

Stan, by the way, seems to react to everything in just about the same way – stoicism and deep thought.  He seems to be of the opinion that, unless he can change something, there’s no use in losing control⁵.  While he was still clinging to the hope that Amador was alive, he was prodding Gad⁶ to do more to save his partner.  Interesting that Stan is fiercely loyal to just about everyone, except for ol’ Sandra Beeman⁷.

As an update, and now in this lovely red text, I finally saw the last minute and a half of the episode⁸.  I assumed it was over with Stan sitting, stoically, in the burger joint, pondering the depths of his conversation about time and the female anatomy with Amador.  In this scene, I got the very distinct feeling that, despite their different personalities, there was a sibling relationship between Stan and Chris.  While reminiscing of Amador talking about lacking pause buttons, an obvious callback to the start of the episode with Liz and Philip, Stan sits quietly, pondering his move. By bringing the burger to the useless KGB agent, we get both a misdirection in terms of his intent, and we get a reference to an obscure method of information gathering utilized during the 2003 Iraq war.

One of the interrogators who was most critical of the Bush Administration's policies on torture said that he was able to break one high-ranking Al-Qaeda member simply by bringing him sugar free cookies, since he was a diabetic.  Similarly, Stan brings a hungry guy a big, juicy burger, and starts talking to him like they were old pals, and tired of the cat-and-mouse game.  "You're KGB, right?  I mean, we both know it... I just need to hear it."  The guy was tired of being questioned, and someone was nice to him.  A little more idle banter, but the guy didn't know he'd already signed his own death warrant.  Stan would have approval to use lethal force to respond to Amador's killing.  The quick spin and shoot was very much in the mode of Stan - nothing's wrong until I react with such speed that you didn't even get another bite of your burger.

As Granny, Martha, and Agent Gad have said, the current state of heightened tensions is not going to stand.  Agent Gad is putting together a “calling all cars response.”  The Reagan Administration was never one to back down from the Soviets, unless it involved quantum leaps in wig technology, and Martha is making sure Phil knows that.  And Granny, of all people, appears to be the peacekeeper.  She doesn’t want the war to get messy, she’d lose so many of her assets.  There are only four episodes left this season, and I can only imagine the strings will be pulled ever tighter.

¹-I have to say, though I am not a mid-thirties single guy, I get a bit squeamish when I hear men tossing around the “p” word with regard to women in movies.  None of my friends use that word other than as a name to call each other to tease one another.  It’s never tossed around as casually as these characters who sauntered off the page of an unpublished Hemingway novel bandy it about.

²-I have listened to my mother and uncle passively argue about where blame was placed in their own parents’ marriage when it dissolved.  Almost always, the children take up sides.

³-We need to talk about one area in which we trailed the Soviets during the Cold War, apparently: wig technology.  Phil’s wig survived both a spirited round of vigorous sex with a surprisingly foul-mouthed Martha, and this switchblade showdown with a jealous Amador, and avoided flying askew.  Marv Albert’s toupee can’t even hold up to a thunderous LeBron tomahawk dunk, and it’s 2013!

⁴-In a way, he does have a stomachache.  It’s just not of the “I ate too much Halloween candy last night;” it’s more the “my former lover’s gentleman caller rammed my own knife into my stomach and then stuffed me into a car.

⁵-I still want to see at least an episode that tells of Stan’s time infiltrating the White Supremacist movement.  It could be paired with something of Phil and Liz back in the motherland – a role reversal, where Phil and Liz don’t have to hide their true selves, but Stan does.

⁶-Agent Gad has finally graduated from Special Agent in Charge John Boy.  Big day for him.

⁷-They couldn’t have named Stan and Sandy’s son “Willie?” just so I could make a bunch of Any Given Sunday/Jamie Foxx/big dick jokes?

⁸-FX President John Landgraf personally apologized for the DVR mixup.  While I knew that the episode was partially clipped, I assumed, based on the construction of the scene - it was very much a "ponder my move which will happen in next week's episode" kind of brooding Stan scene, I had no clue until I laid down last night and started reading Alan Sepinwall's tweets about the truncation that I'd missed something.  I sat down this morning and hammered out the last 90 seconds, which are certainly important for the advancement of plot this season.